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TracyProfiler: Use rr-safe nopl; rdtsc sequence (#7225)
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Several users have reported masssive slowdowns to rr record/replay
in packages that have the tracy client loaded. The issue turns out
to be an unlucky false positive in an rr heuristic that determines
the patchability of `rdtsc`. In rr master, it is possible to guarantee
patchability by using a specific `nopl; rdtsc` sequence. Add a patch
to tracy to do just that.

See also
rr-debugger/rr#3580
JuliaLang/julia#50975
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Keno authored Aug 20, 2023
1 parent d72819f commit b9a9274
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1 change: 1 addition & 0 deletions T/TracyProfiler/build_tarballs.jl
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Expand Up @@ -44,6 +44,7 @@ fi
atomic_patch -p1 ../patches/TracyProfiler-nfd-extended-1.0.2.patch
atomic_patch -p1 ../patches/TracyProfiler-filter-user-text.patch
atomic_patch -p1 ../patches/TracyProfiler-no-divide-zero.patch
atomic_patch -p1 ../patches/TracyProfiler-rr-nopl-seq.patch
# Build / install the profiler GUI
make -e -j${nproc} -C profiler/build/unix LEGACY=1 IMAGE=tracy release
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43 changes: 43 additions & 0 deletions T/TracyProfiler/bundled/patches/TracyProfiler-rr-nopl-seq.patch
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@@ -0,0 +1,43 @@
commit 21a65e08372a37342e598422a2bd58263857807e
Author: Keno Fischer <keno@juliacomputing.com>
Date: Sat Aug 19 01:40:18 2023 +0000

Use patchable rdtsc sequence to avoid slowdowns under rr

We (Julia) ship both support for using tracy to trace julia applications,
as well as using `rr` (https://github.com/rr-debugger/rr) for record-replay debugging.
After our most recent rebuild of tracy, users have been reporting signfificant performance
slowdowns when `rr` recording a session that happens to also load the tracy library
(even if tracing is not enabled). Upon further examination, the recompile happened
to trigger a protective heuristic that disabled rr's patching of tracy's use of
`rdtsc` because an earlier part of the same function happened to look like a
conditional branch into the patch region. See https://github.com/rr-debugger/rr/pull/3580
for details. To avoid this issue occurring again in future rebuilds of tracy,
adjust tracy's `rdtsc` sequence to be `nopl; rdtsc`, which (as of of the
linked PR) is a sequence that is guaranteed to bypass this heuristic
and not incur the additional overhead when run under rr.

diff --git a/public/client/TracyProfiler.hpp b/public/client/TracyProfiler.hpp
index 1b825ea3..27f6bbbd 100644
--- a/public/client/TracyProfiler.hpp
+++ b/public/client/TracyProfiler.hpp
@@ -209,7 +209,18 @@ public:
if( HardwareSupportsInvariantTSC() )
{
uint64_t rax, rdx;
- asm volatile ( "rdtsc" : "=a" (rax), "=d" (rdx) );
+ // Some external tooling (such as rr) wants to patch our rdtsc and replace it by a
+ // branch to control the external input seen by a program. This kind of patching is
+ // not generally possible depending on the surrounding code and can lead to significant
+ // slowdowns if the compiler generated unlucky code and rr and tracy are used together.
+ // To avoid this, use the rr-safe `nopl 0(%rax, %rax, 1); rdtsc` instruction sequence,
+ // which rr promises will be patchable independent of the surrounding code.
+ asm volatile (
+ // This is nopl 0(%rax, %rax, 1), but assemblers are inconsistent about whether
+ // they emit that as a 4 or 5 byte sequence and we need to be guaranteed to use
+ // the 5 byte one.
+ ".byte 0x0f, 0x1f, 0x44, 0x00, 0x00\n\t"
+ "rdtsc" : "=a" (rax), "=d" (rdx) );
return (int64_t)(( rdx << 32 ) + rax);
}
# else

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